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Making a Baby Swing- DIT

My husband and I do lots of things together well, but making things together is a kind of newly found joy. I guess it started with our home, our garden and our baby of course, but actually designing & crafting something together is not something we have really done yet. Saturday morning we spent nap time together drinking coffee and searching for images of baby swings. There were lots, mostly plastic, some beautiful wood, some cloth and all kind of shockingly expensive.

We could have probably got one used, but it spurred a fun conversation about design and technique, craftsmanship & quality and of course our shared love of homemade. I truly admire my husband’s fearless DIY attitude. He can look at things and understand how they are made, alter them in his mind and tada!! he has made it with his own two hands and more likely than not with things he had stashed away in his shed, salvaged, saved for a rainy day. For this project we put both our design minds together, rummaged around in our stashes and here is how we spent our Saturday DITing (Doing it Together).

It started with an old pair of Mountain Kakai’s, really nice sturdy work pants, worn, loved and finally ripped above the knee. I stashed them in the sewing box to fix or transform someday and that day was today.

I basically looked at the swing I most admired and realized it was a basic cross of fabric.

This awesome swing I found on Pinterest from an Australian company called Swingz

I turned the pants into shorts and proceeded to line up, pin and cut the legs of the pants. I got kind of engrossed so it didn’t photograph this part of the process but I tried to cut as little as possible and use those strong triple seams whenever I could so this swing wouldn’t make me nervous as my little baby swung around 4 feet above our brick porch. It was a basic bucket seat with sleeves for dowels to slip into so the swing would have a skeleton to hang from. That is where my husband came. He drilled the oak dowels, cut and sanded them so they stuck out a bit from the sleeves. Then he got an old climbing rope slipped it through the sleeves as well, made a few knots, and hung it from a carabiner and big eye bolt in the viga on the porch. And just like that–there it was……smiles for all!!

We all love the swing and have spent hours playing with it already. But more than the actual thing, we love being together; envisioning, creating, recycling, using our hands & stashes of saved goods, staying home and enjoying the sunshine……and as we like to say around here ‘Why DIY when you can DIT’?